Virginia's notebook

July 19 2003

The publishing of newly discovered manuscripts by Virginia Woolf has prompted yet another examination of the great writer’s work. Here is novelist Doris Lessing’s essay on Woolf.

These pieces are like five-finger exercises for future excellence. Not that they
are negligible, being lively, and with the direct and sometimes brutal observation,
the discrimination, the fastidious judgment one expects from her but wait: that
word judgment  it will not do.

Virginia Woolf cared very much about refinement of taste, her own and her subjects.
I imagine that her taste and insight are not fine; when she described people she
ran into stock phrases, and took rather a cheap view (Miss Reeves).

This note is struck often throughout her work, and because of her insistence one
has to remember that this woman, in February 1910, took part in a silly jape,
pretending to be of the Emperor of Abyssinias party on a visit to a British
battleship; that she and her friends went in for the naughty words you would expect
from schoolchildren who have just discovered smut; that she was to some extent
anti-Semitic, capable of referring to her admirable and loving husband as the
Jew.

The sketch here, Jews, is an unpleasant piece of writing. But then
you have to remember a similarly noisy and colourful Jewess in Between the
Acts described affectionately  Woolf likes her.

So this writing here is often unregenerate Woolf, early work pieces, and some
might argue they would have been better left undiscovered. Not I: it is always
instructive to see what early crudities a writer has refined into balance 
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None of that lot, the Bloomsbury artists, can be understood without remembering
that they were the very heart and essence of Bohemia, whose attitudes have been
so generally absorbed it is hard to see how sharply Bohemia stood out against
its time.

They are sensitive and art-loving, unlike their enemies and opposites, the
crude business class. E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf s good friend, wrote
Howards End, where the battle between art and the Wilcoxes is set out. On
the one hand the upholders of civilisation, on the other, philistines, the Wilcoxes.

To be sensitive and fine was to fight for the survival of real and good values,
against mockery, misunderstanding and, often, real persecution. Many a genuine
or aspiring Bohemian was cut off by outraged parents.

But it was not only the Wilcoxes  crass middle-class vulgarians 
but the working people who were enemies. The snobbery of Woolf and her friends
now seems not merely laughable, but damaging, a narrowing ignorance. In Forsters
Howards End two upper-class young women, seeing a working person suffer,
remark that they dont feel it in the same way  as I
used to hear white people, when they did notice the misery of the Blacks, say,
They arent like us; they have thick skins.

With Woolf we are up against a knot, a tangle of unlikeable prejudices, some of
her time, some personal, and this must lead us to look again at her literary criticism,
which was often as fine as anything written before or since, and yet she was capable
of thumping prejudice, like the fanatics who can see only their own truth.

Delicacy and sensitivity in writing was everything and that meant Arnold Bennett,
and writers like him, were not merely old hat, the despised older generation,
but deserved obloquy and oblivion.

Virginia Woolf was not one for half measures. The idea that one may like Arnold
Bennett and Virginia Woolf, Woolf and James Joyce was not possible for her. These
polarisations, unfortunately endemic in the literary world, always do damage:
Woolf did damage.

For decades the arbitrary ukase dominated the higher reaches of literary criticism.
(Perhaps we should ask why literature is so easily influenced by immoderate opinion?)

A fine writer, Arnold Bennett, has to be rejected, apologised for, and then 
later  passionately defended, in exactly her own way of doing things: attack
or passionate defence. Bennett: good; Woolf: bad. But I think the acid has leaked
out and away from the confrontation.

A recent film, The Hours, presents Woolf in a way surely her contemporaries would
have marvelled at. She is the very image of a sensitive suffering lady novelist.
Where is the malicious, spiteful woman she in fact was? And dirty-mouthed, too,
though with an upper-class accent.

Posterity, it seems, has to soften and make respectable, smooth and polish, unable
to see that the rough, the raw, the discordant, may be the source and nurse of
creativity.

It was inevitable that Woolf would end up as a genteel lady of letters, though
I dont think any of us could have believed she would be played by a young,
beautiful, fashionable girl who never smiles, whose permanent frown shows how
many deep and difficult thoughts she is having. Good God! The woman enjoyed life
when she wasnt ill; liked parties, her friends, picnics, excursions, jaunts.
How we do love female victims; oh, how we do love them.

What Virginia Woolf did for literature was to experiment all her life, trying
to make her novels nets to catch what she saw as a subtler truth about life. Her
styles were attempts to use her sensibility to make of the living
the luminous envelope she insists our consciousness is, not the linear
plod she perceived writing like Bennetts to be.

Some people like one book, others another. There are those who admire The
Waves, her most extreme experiment, which to me is a failure, but a brave one.
Night and Day was her most conventional novel, recognisable by the common
reader, but she attempted to widen and deepen it.

From her first novel, The Voyage Out, to the last, the unfinished Between
the Acts  which has for me the stamp of truth; I remember whole passages,
and incidents of a few words or lines seem to hold the essence of, lets
say, old age, or marriage, or how you experience a much-loved picture 
her writing life was a progression of daring experiments. And if we do not always
think well of her progeny  some attempts to emulate her have been unfortunate
 then without her, without James Joyce (and they have more in common than
either would have cared to acknowledge) our literature would have been poorer.

She is a writer some people love to hate. It is painful when someone whose judgment you respect comes out with a hymn of dislike, or even hate, for Virginia Woolf. I always want to argue with them; but how can you not see how wonderful she is.

For me, her two great achievements are Orlando, which always makes me laugh, it is such a witty little book, perfect, a gem; and To the Lighthouse, which I think is one of the finest novels in English.

Yet people of the tenderest discrimination cannot find a good word to say. I want to protest that surely it should not be "the dreadful novels of Virginia Woolf", "silly Orlando", but rather "I don't like Orlando", "I don't like To the Lighthouse", "I don't like Virginia Woolf". After all, when people of equal discrimination to oneself adore, or hate, the same book, the smallest act of modesty, the minimum act of respect for the great profession of literary critic should be, "I don't like Woolf, but that is just my bias".

Another problem with her is that when it is not a question of one of her achieved works, she is often on an edge where the sort of questions that lurk in the unfinished shadier areas of life are unresolved. In this collection is a little sketch, called A Modern Salon, about Lady Ottoline Morrell, who played such a role in the lives and work of many of the artists and writers of her time, from D.H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russell.

We are glad to read what Woolf thinks, when so many others have had their say. Woolf describes her as a great lady who has become discontented with her own class and found what she wanted in artists, writers. They see her as "a disembodied spirit escaping from her world into a purer air". And, "she comes from a distance, with strange colours upon her". That aristocrats had, and in some places still have, glamour, we have to acknowledge, and here Woolf is trying to analyse it and its effects on "humbler creatures".

But there is something uncomfortably sticky here; she labours on, sentence after sentence, until it seems she is trying to stick a pin through a butterfly's head. There were few aristocrats in the Bohemian world of that time: it is a pity Ottoline Morrell was such a bizarre representative of it. A pitiful woman, she seems now, so generous with money and hospitality to so many proteges, and betrayed and caricatured by many of them. They do not come out very well, the high-minded citizens of Bohemia, in their collision with money and aristocracy.

It is hard for a writer to be objective about another who has had such an influence - on me, on other women writers. Not her styles, her experiments, her sometimes intemperate pronouncements, but simply, her existence, her bravery, her wit, her ability to look at the situation of women without bitterness. And yet she could hit back. There were not so many female writers then, when she began to write, or even when I did. A hint of the hostilities confronted is in her sketch here of James Strachey and his Cambridge friends. "I was conscious that not only my remarks but my presence was criticised. They wished for the truth, and doubted whether a woman could speak it or be it." And then the wasp's swift sting: "I had to remember that one is not full grown at 21."

I think a good deal of her waspishness was simply that: women writers did not, and occasionally even now do not, have an easy time of it.

We all wish our idols and exemplars were perfect; a pity she was such a wasp, such a snob - and all the rest of it, but love has to be warts and all. At her best she was a very great artist, I think, and part of the reason was that she was suffused with the spirit of "They wished for the truth" - like her friends, and indeed, all of Bohemia.